Companies in every industry are going through some stage of digital transformation. Enterprises are working hard to reinvent their businesses to thrive in an increasingly digital world, whether by growing revenue, expanding globally, or developing faster ways to get products and services to their customers. But they won’t get there fast enough if they can’t transform their IT infrastructures to scale and perform with greater agility than they can today.

That’s why our continuing partnership with Google Cloud, a leading global digital innovator, is so critical to our customers. Last week’s announcement of Google Cloud’s Partner Interconnect on the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ (ECX) Fabric demonstrates the power of this kind of co-innovation at work. Together we’re providing the most geographically comprehensive interconnection, with the fastest throughput, to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Equinix and Google Cloud innovating cloud interconnection

Based on software-defined networking (SDN) technology, ECX Fabric eliminates the need for customers to go through the public internet or a physical cross connect to access GCP services. Even those customers who are not in a physical location with GCP can gain access to its capabilities remotely via the ECX Fabric within an Equinix data center. This ubiquitous interconnection provides enterprises with an on-demand, elastic and scalable cloud interconnection service that is as agile as the cloud services they are accessing.

Equinix not only provides a vast number of Google Cloud Interconnection options, but we also offer direct and on-demand access to Google Cloud services on a global scale. With dedicated interconnection services to GCP in 19 metros worldwide, we’re making it easier for customers to consume Google Cloud services from anywhere.

Directly interconnecting to Google Cloud services (either locally or through the ECX Fabric) is also a more economical solution for our customers. It provides a cost-effective way to get superior performance through proximate, low-latency connections and a choice of more than 1,700 network providers to interconnect to GCP services on Platform Equinix™. In some cases, transferring large amounts of data over dedicated interconnection between peering networks can actually help our customers avoid the need to purchase additional bandwidth to access GCP over the public internet or using VPN tunnels.

Gaining direct and private connectivity to public cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud, for hybrid/multicloud environments is a vital step on the enterprise path to a more scalable digital infrastructure. Private interconnection to GCP gives enterprise customers on-demand access to Google’s full portfolio of scalable, cloud-based PaaS, IaaS and SaaS solutions for their hybrid/multicloud infrastructures. It provides the control and predictability of a dedicated, high-performance, low-latency connection, along with the security gained from privately interconnecting to GCP and bypassing the public internet.

All these capabilities are especially critical for customers with large data sets that require access to scalable cloud-based storage, such as Google Cloud Storage, and analytics engines such as Google Analytics 360 Suite. For example, retailers and financial services companies depend on secure transactions and data exchange, and direct interconnection between data and analytics is essential to fully capitalize on real-time customer insights. Entertainment and media companies need fast access to large media files from many locations around the world and proximate, low-latency interconnection between data and analytics enables more personalized, on-demand video access. The cloud interconnection solutions we are inventing side-by-side with Google are making these things happen for our customers.

At Equinix, we believe customer-inspired innovation is critical to build exceptional products and services. Our partnership with Google Cloud reflects the great things that can happen when leaders anticipate the friction points that can slow down digital business and join forces to co-ideate solutions that remove them. We look forward to continuing to work closely with our friends and colleagues at Google Cloud to solve problems and accelerate opportunities for the enterprises shaping the digital future.